


What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

by eudaimon



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 23:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5394968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne has never really known what it is to be in love; she's had no use for it, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rhllors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhllors/gifts).



> I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed writing this story for you. It is the story of my heart (and always has been - I'm pretty sure I have a novel in me about these actual, historical people).
> 
> I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it.  
> Happy Yuletide!

The fight for Nassau, as it turns out, is more of a tumble - a slow, sad slipping into ruins. It's a war they're never going to win so, in the meantime, they carry on mostly as before. Eleanor Guthrie's absence is a bell that's always ringing out. The bay echoes with it, the air laced with sulphur and cordite. The whole island smells cocked and ready to fire. 

 

Same as before, then. The more the world changes, the more nothing fucking does.

 

Anne's lived long enough now to know that nothing ever changes. Not for long. She's used to it. It barely even stings. She is, she finds, a person shaped by what's already dead to her, by what she's put behind. A woman can be all scar; what's still tender is the part that isn't healed yet.

 

But there's a lot of her that goes unhealed.

 

Like everything else in town, the brothel keeps running - they eat, drink, fuck, make money hand over fist. Her father was a Bible reading man, liked to pretend at being holy, and, more than anything, it reminds Anne of the last days of Sodom, when she looks out of the window. Still, she is safe. Her harbour is a calm one. More often than not, now, she sleeps cradled between them, landlocked so it makes sense, when, more often than not, now, she dreams about the sea. 

 

In the middle of a particular night no different from any others, she wakes and leaves Max and Jack tangled up together in sweat-soaked sheets (she's getting used to to odd mix of jealousy and tenderness when she sees them together, Max's head pillowed on Jack's shoulder, Jack's hand against the swell of Max's hip. It's a twinge, now, more than a stab. The echo of an old injury. The memory of how she's always been hurt before). She leaves the two of them naked and dreaming and she comes down to get a drink, water or rum, finds him sitting there, wreathed in shadow and darkness. She doesn't have much Irish left to her, but what she remembers is that, in the language that was spoken to her in her crib, a slave would be _fir gorum_ because one of the first names that she learned for the Devil was _an Fear Dubh_ and she might have served under Charles Vane, might know what hell looks like when visited on a man, but, sitting there in shadows between the tables and the trees, that is all that he brings to mind.

 

It wouldn't be the first time that the Devil sat down in Nassau.

 

"Capt'n Flint," she says, shocked, feeling naked in Jack's shirt and her bare legs, her hair tangled around her face. "Didn't see you there."

"I don't suppose you did," he says and she couldn't be certain, but maybe she catches the twist of a smile in his voice - if it could be said that a man like him might smile at all. She can count the times she saw Vane smile and not even use all of her fingers. 

 

There's a cup of rum on the table in front of him, a bottle uncorked. He kicks out a chair. "Join me, Miss Bonny. If you please."

 

(Later, she won't know why she did it. But, then again, there'll be no record of this meeting -nobody but the two of them will ever know that it even happened - so maybe, in the moment under the moment, that's as good as never happening at all?).

 

Tugging Jack's shirt down to make sure it's not going anywhere, she takes the seat that's offered. After a moment, Flint leans forward, pouring a measure of rum into another cup and pushing it her way. He waits for her to lift it.

 

"Have you ever been in love, Miss Bonny?" he asks her

.

Now there's a bloody question. When she was thirteen, already bought and paid for and married (not a pretty story, not one she really wants to tell to the man in front of her), she had thought that all love must come with bruises. At thirteen, already a wife for half a year, John Bonny had not bought her one pretty thing, but he had given her scars in place of jewels, things she would carry with her for the rest of her life, things she would never quite be rid of. Jack came into her life with blood in place of rubies, spangling the jagged edges of a wound. If she lives to be a hundred, which seems unlikely, she'll remember the look on Jack's face then. He'd been little more than a boy himself, seventeen or eighteen years to her thirteen, on the day that he grabbed her hand and ran and she'd lifted her skirt with her free hand and kept pace.

 

She hadn't had much use for dresses after that. Around that time, she'd realised that her heart could be less an anchor and more a thing with sails. 

 

(A thing that they don't talk about: Anne Bonny, nineteen years old and swollen with the baby that they'd grown between them. Nine months spent moving along a parabola of her own design, that baby kicking like a cannon. A son born on Cuba, named James for his father, left behind with people who knew how to love land, and then they got as far away from him as possible because how were they supposed to avoid fucking up a life that beautiful and fragile? 

 

Another thing that they don't talk about: that she does dream about him, from time to time. She wonders what he takes from Jack, what he gets from her. She wonders if he's happy, if he's loved, if his eyes are still as blue as the sky was the day that he was born.

 

A child needs roots, Anne knows, and she? Has always had to much of the sea in her. Enough drops in her to make a fucking ocean).

 

Does she love Jack? Absolutely. Always, and without question. Is she _in love_ with him? Sometimes, she catches a glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye and thinks that she must be, because how else to explain that fluttering in her chest? The sex isn't always magnificent, isn't always even good, but there are other moments, the moments when he leans in and touches her shoulder, kisses the side of her face, hooks his fingers through hers and she feels like something entirely made of light. 

 

Which might be being in love with him, now that she thinks about it. 

Or, at least, something like it. 

 

_I can't be your wife_ , she said. And she meant it. Utterly. Completely. She had a husband once - why would she ever want another? And, anyway, Jack wouldn't make a good husband, would he? But he is her heart made flesh and walking the fucking earth and she could no more leave him than fly in the air. She tried it, got as far as Port Royale and all that she learned is that any distance, no matter how far, is a circle in the end.

 

She realises that she hasn't answered his question.

 

"I love the sea," she says, knowing that that isn't quite the question that he'd asked, but she thinks that it's an answer that he'll understand, all the same.

 

This time, he definitely smiles. It's the smile of a man unused to smiling, out of practice with it. He tilts his head, takes a swallow of his rum.

 

"I have had the…" He stumbles over the right word. "Privilege to be in love twice in my life, Miss Bonny, and let me tell you something that I have learned." He drains the cup, sets it down. "Love is hell. But you'll never, ever learn"

 

Years later, she'll remember the way that he said those words, the look on his face when he said them. 

 

*

 

Turns out that there's not much that _can_ stop them, in the end

 

The Vanity is theirs, all theirs, their little country. Mary Read (now there's a name for legend and banner headline) comes and goes but Jack is always in her bed. Astride him, a leg bent on either side of his skinny hips, she presses her hands against his chest, ebbs and flows like the tide. She bends her head, lets her hair curtain both of them. The air between them smells of sex and blood and the metallic stink of money. She kisses him deep and hungry, presses forward with lips and tongue.

 

"Promise me you'll never leave me," she says.

"Oh, my darling," he says. 

 

Neither of them ever have it in them to promise, in the end.

 

*

 

The end of the world, when it comes, comes in smoke and fire and blood. The Vanity limps into London with all three of them in irons. When it came to it, Jack turned coat yet again, proved himself to be the coward that he was all along. In the middle of it all, Anne found herself wondering what happened to that brave and brilliant boy who spilled John Bonny's blood, who saved her from a life of pain and humiliation, who brought her to the sea. She wonders what happened to the man who made love to her for the first time, when she'd only ever been fucked before. What happened to that man who showed her that sex could be a gentle thing, less a prison, more a ladder. 

 

She wonders what happened to the man that she loved?

One thing, certain: hanging is hell on a handsome face.

 

_If you'd fought like a man, they wouldn't need to hang you like a dog_ , she says, but what she means is that he broke her bloody heart.

 

Oh, love. Oh, Jack.

 

*

 

And now, she supposes, nobody will ever know the truth of it but God. How Jack Rackham died dancing and Mary Read drowned in her own body and Anne Bonny walked away and disappeared without trace after pleading her belly. 

 

What became of Anne Bonny? She never hanged, that’s for sure. Too clever for that, Annie. Liar. Bitch. Escape artiste extraordinaire. Anne Bonney, stuff of legend and banner headlines. Pirate Queen, star of many a sea? Maybe that baby was a lie. Maybe not.

 

But just imagine…

 

Jack's been in the ground for a decade which means that, somewhere, their son is nearly twenty years old. If he lived this long. Anne is not the praying kind, but she's had conversations with God about that, from time to time over the years. By now, she's found a way to forgive him, Jack.

 

She thinks about what Flint said to her a lot. About the hell that loving someone is. Or can be.

 

There are a lot of ways that Anne’s story can end. Just think; Annie on her Irish daddy’s plantation, her bastard fostered, dwindling into an old maid’s life. No? What about the trophy wife Annie would have made by then, sun-edged, scarred, grown tight and lithe and well-oiled, shrunk by salt to be her most useful size in her stolen gowns? But she had one husband, once, and her heart's pathways are clogged with sand that is a bit like Jack's memory, warm and soft but somehow coarse, too. It rubs. And so she cannot forget.

 

Over the years she learned many tricks, but the finest one she ever pulled was how to disappear without trace. 

 

*

 

So maybe she's in a tavern when she sees him, late at night, the barmaid's head nodding. And maybe there's no-one to witness this meeting, so maybe, in the moment under the moment, that's as good as never happening at all?

 

Having lived this long, Anne finds that there's no limit to the impossible things that she can believe.

 

When she turns, she finds that he's already looking at her. She shifts her weight in the chair, pulling her legs up under the drape of her skirt. She was intensely aware of him only a few feet away from her. He looks older. More tired. But isn't that true of all of them? Haven't they all, the ones who survived, lived longer than they meant to? 

 

"How is the world, Miss Bonny?" he asks her.

"Cruel, Cap'n Flint," she says. "And stupid."

 

She suspects that he knows that better than anyone. 

 

He laughs. It sounds incredibly loud in the dim warmth of the bar, especially when she'd started to feel like they were the only people alive on the surface of the world or above it. There's something about her that reminds her of how much she misses Jack.

 

"Did you ever hear the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Miss Bonny?"

 

She nods her head.

 

"Jack liked that one," she says.

"And how did he tell it?"

 

"She died and he sang and it almost worked but then nothing did. Back to hell she went." She shrugs. "Because love ain't stronger than death. Can't be. Heart only holds out for so long."

 

And doesn't she know that that's the truth, by now?

 

"Ah," he says, raising his glass to her in a lazy sort toast. "The hazards of love."

 

She can't even bear to look at him. He reminds her of too much. They're the ghosts of a world that doesn't exist any longer.

 

The world wasn't wide enough for all of them in the end.

 

*

 

That night, for the first time in a long time, she dreams about Jack. She meets him on the sand, still warm in the swinging light from the lamps, both of them bare-foot, Jack stripped to the waist, his hair pushed back in fingered furrows from his face. They're somewhere that she's never been before. The water is as clear as a true heart.

 

"Hello, Jack," she says, as he slips an arm around her waist.

"Annie, darling," he says. "It's been too long."

 

A lifetime, almost. Longer than she expected to live. She was never supposed to make old bones.

 

He kisses her, there on the sand. There's something so familiar about him. 

 

And it's true in the end, isn't it? Even in the dream, she knows it.

Partners. Until they put her in the fucking ground.

 

*

 

In other words:

The hell of loving other people is not enough to stop us.


End file.
